Hands-on with the HTC Desire Eye, a phone with a 13MP front camera

NEW YORK—We've been worried about HTC lately. The company had a stretch where it was in the news for all the wrong reasons. The HTC-built Facebook phone was a flop, its employees were constantly leaving the company and/or being arrested for leaking company secrets, and its camera supplier said it was "no longer a tier one customer.”

The company seems to be turning things around though. In the last two quarters, HTC has gotten back into profitability, and the company is making a high-profile jump back into tablets by producing the Nexus 9 for Google.

Today in New York, the company is showing off the "flagship" product of its mid-range Desire line of phones, the AT&T-exclusive "Desire Eye." If you can't already tell from the pictures, it's addressing a popular use-case for smartphones as of late—selfies.

Front facing cameras came to smartphones specifically for video chat. Most services cap out at 1080p, which means you only really need a 2MP front facing camera to get the job done. No one really wants to take a picture with a 2MP camera these days, but that is what many high-end smartphones—including Samsung's Galaxy S5—still come with for the front camera. The Desire Eye makes selfies a core competency by basically making the front camera as good as the rear camera. The phone has a whopping 13MP front camera sensor.

The 13MP front sensor isn't just for the spec sheet, either. It's paired with a massive front lens, which is about the size of a rear camera, and there's even a front-facing dual-LED flash. If you're the type that puts tape over your laptop camera, you'll probably be a little creeped out by this. Like the Eye of Sauron, the large camera lens stares at you constantly as you use the phone. A normal front-facing camera is rather unassuming and easy to forget about, but a lens this large takes some getting used to.

This is from the "Desire" line, which means it's a mid-range device, and HTC's usual aluminum body is out. The Desire Eye is all plastic, but it's a nice plastic. It's very "dry" and doesn't collect fingerprints or grease. The whole phone has a pleasant soft-touch treatment that feels great to hold. HTC has even tried to bring over the "no gap" construction from the One series to this device. The white and reddish-orange plastic sections are fused together—there aren't any seams to see.

The specs are nearly at flagship levels. There's a 5.2-inch, 1080p LCD, a 2.3Ghz Snapdragon 800 SoC, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, a MicroSD slot, and a 2400mAh battery. It's missing the IR blaster from the One M8, and HTC has dumped the Duo Camera and "Ultrapixel" camera technology, going with a 13MP camera sensor for the rear of the device. Best of all for shutter bugs, there's a hardware camera button!

One of the worst parts of the One M7 and M8 are how tall the devices are, thanks to the front "BoomSound" speakers and large bezels. The One M8, for example, has a 5-inch screen, just like every other flagship. But compare that device's 146.4mm length to another 5-inch phone, like the Nexus 5 at 137.9mm.

The Desire Eye still has BoomSound speakers, but they've been integrated into a small slit between the touchscreen glass and the white phone body. The result is front-facing speakers that are still loud, but don't add a huge amount of vertical height to the device. The space that was saved by the speaker design is now taken up by the massive camera lens, making the device 151.7mm tall—the same length as the Galaxy Note 3.

HTC is packing the device with camera-focused software features, too. One mode allows the users to just hold still to take a picture, no buttons required. Another shutter mode works via voice command, just "say cheese" and it will take a picture. There are several camera modes that use the front and back camera at the same time, so the picture contains the user and whatever the user is looking at. It's also easy to make split screen images and 2x2 photobooth images. Like many third-party camera apps, there's also a "skin smoothing" slider that will blur out your imperfections.

We don't have any details on the price or exact release date. HTC says that's up to AT&T. There's also only this one color.

HTC also announced this odd little periscope camera. It's called the "HTC Re," (pronounced like the "re" in "record"), and it has no viewfinder. You just pick it up, press the shutter button on the back and some kind of picture is taken. You can pair the device to a smartphone and use the phone as a viewfinder, but HTC's pitch for the device says that you shouldn't. The company wants to solve the phenomenon where a person taking pictures of an event doesn't feel as if they are part of the event. So to stop you from viewing an event through your camera viewfinder, HTC says you can just point this and snap away, while watching with your own two eyes.

Aiming is the hard part. The 13MP camera has a 146-degree field of view, allowing the user to just point in the general direction of what they want, and it will end up somewhere in the picture. HTC says the Re has a bigger, higher quality sensor than what you would find in a typical smartphone. With practice HTC says it's possible to get over any framing anxiety, but we couldn't test that claim with our limited time with the device.

One press on the back button takes a picture, and a long press starts a video recording. The button on the front starts a 96FPS slow-motion video, which seems like an awfully niche feature to have its own hardware button. There are microphones on the front and top and a record light on the front. On the bottom is a USB port for charging and a standard 1/4-inch tripod thread. The Re has IP57 water resistance. HTC says it can survive being submerged in up to one meter of water out of the box. There is also a rubber cap for the bottom, which will offer much better water protection than one meter.

One of the neatest things about the Re is the power switch—there isn't one. The device goes to sleep automatically. To power it on, just pick it up. The body is touch sensitive, and while the wake up time is just a moment, the touch sensors give the device a head start. It's up and running by the time the user has aimed the camera.

HTC says the 820mAh battery is good for 1,000 16MP images or 1.5 hours of HD video. Storage is handled by a MicroSD card, and it comes with an 8GB one in the box. It can also send photos to a tethered phone running the requisite app. Tethering uses Bluetooth for the initial connection, but the device switches to Wi-Fi direct for speedy data transfers. HTC says it doesn't want to do any kind of ecosystem lock in with the Re—it'll have an Android app for anything with 4.3 and up, and there will even be an iOS version. If you're interested, the Re comes in orange, navy blue, teal, and white. It'll run you $199 at recamera.com, Amazon, Best Buy or a carrier store.